Scaremongering won't help us deal with climate issue
- Source: Global Times
- [21:12 December 20 2009]
- Comments
By Barry Cunnongham
Without a scintilla of evidence that rising temperatures threaten the extinction of life on the planet, anyone who expresses common sense doubts about the Doomsday prophecies of climate alarmists is dismissed as a "skeptic," an "extremist," or a heretic in the religion of environmentalism.
No one needs to apologize for being a scientific ignoramus on climate change when the world's leading publicist for global warming, Al Gore, is not a scientist either.
Yet some blindly accept Gore's claim in An Inconvenient Truth that melting ice caps and rising sea levels will drown New York City and Shanghai under 15 feet of water, despite the scientific consensus being a rise of a mere 0.18 to 0.60 meters over the next century.
The sulphurous smog that regularly blots out the Beijing skyline is a daily reminder that everybody values clean air and water.
When you feel that every breath might be your last, you know that carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced.
I accept the weight of scientific evidence that the average daily temperature of the Earth has heated up about 1 C over the past century, and that the cause is man-made.
How could we believe otherwise when the media in the 1970s promoted global cooling as the greatest threat to Planet Earth, leading to a "New Ice Age?"
But as we have witnessed at the events in Copenhagen, the debate is no longer about clean air and water. It's about "saving the Earth" with the alarmist notion that scientists can predict weather patterns 10, 20 or 100 years from now.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spent a couple of billion dollars studying long-range weather forecasting and concluded with what any TV weather girl could have told them: Nobody can predict the weather beyond two weeks and even then the forecast is sometimes wrong.
Yet the world's political establishment gathered in Copenhagen is prepared to spend trillions of dollars on a global warming theory based on computer models of weather forecasting, a disputed "hockey stick" graph, and the study of tree rings.
Credibility is at the heart of "Climategate," the e-mails leaked by a whistle-blower who hacked into thousands of scientific papers at the Climatic Research Unit in the UK.
